Hello Michael,
Am 29.01.2011 21:58, schrieb Michael Kenward:
> Follow the links in this piece and you arrive at a paper that wants me to pay US$34.00 before I can read it.
>
> http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a931921327~db=all
Yes, and this is something that many scientists as well as funders are
quite unhappy with. Unfortunately the publishing companies have often a
de-facto monopoly that's difficult to change.
The alternative are open access publishing models, which were initially
developed and championed by scientists and are growing fast. Hopefully,
in a few years time, it will be very rare for users to have to pay for
scientific articles.
Success stories are PLoS (Public Library of Science,
http://www.plos.org) who publish first class paper in the same league as
Nature or Science, and Biomedcentral (http://www.biomedcentral.com) that
have a wide range of journals in the biomedical field.
Funders support Open Access strongly, you find a list of the policies
here (the paper from the ERC has quite strong words about publishing
companies...): http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/funderpolicies/
I believe the science engagement community should also strongly support
and promote open access, and I'm kind of surprised that this isn't
really discussed much (except by Mike Kenward who points out that issue
again and again - thank you!).
All public engagement will remain superficial, unless people who are
interested in understanding science in more details have easy and open
access to the scientific literature, whether they are journalists,
teachers, patients who want info about their illness, or just anybody
who is curious.
> What was that about the lack of openness in the media? (I agree about that, by the way.)
Well, yes. I certainly agree that not everything is fine. However, I
believe my basic message stands. Even with non-free articles, you can
still get them - you can pay, or you can go to a library. It's
inconvenient (and that needs to change), but not inaccessible.
On the other hand, how can you get a record of the editing decisions in
a newsroom? Or the record of the business decisions that lead to the
banking crisis? Can you buy them somewhere for 34$? I guess if you want
to scrutinize that, there is a much more fundamental barrier than the
inconvenience of having to go to a library - they'll probably just tell
you that it's not your business and you don't have a right to know it.
So, I stand by my opinion that science is a fundamentally more open
activity than many other activities that dominate society.
Cheers
Stephan
--
Stephan Matthiesen
http://www.stephan-matthiesen.de
Neu auf www.science-texts.de: Wülstig - das Januarmuster
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